CHAPTER ONE
The seagulls bounced around him, lighting just long enough to snatch up the pieces of bread, then hovering in the air, wings whipping, to wait for more.
Gulls were mercenary and self-absorbed, but he liked them. They were honest about their selfishness, unafraid of disapproval. At the same time, they were beautiful and graceful and they were the sight and sound of home.
He’d spent his entire life in Apalachicola and on St. George Island, just a few miles from the coast across the causeway. To his mind, it was one of the few places left that actually felt like Florida, with its century-old brick and clapboard shops and houses, the marina filled with shrimp and oyster boats and people who couldn’t care less about Disney World.
Every time he’d left the Panhandle, for college or just to escape, he’d always felt slightly lost. Cities and nightlife and people with unfamiliar last names quickly lost their luster. Whenever he’d arrived home, after a few weeks or a few years, he’d felt his lungs open up to the salt and the heat and he’d known that he hadn’t really breathed since he’d left.
Always, he came here first, to this virtually undisturbed, unblemished part of the island that was now a state park. Here, he could be the only sign of humanity among the white dunes and the sea grasses and the gulls and crabs that lived among them. Looking out to the ocean, he felt at once humbled and comforted by his own unimportance.
This was his sanctuary, his place of respite and refreshment. Here, there were no problems; there were no decisions or responsibilities or agendas. He could come here and empty his mind. He could fill his lungs with great, hungry breaths of salty air and be renewed, then go back to the mainland stronger, calmer, more ready to deal with his life and the people in it.
A gust of early-summer wind snatched at the plastic bag of bread, winding it around his wrist and causing the hovering seagulls to reverse themselves in the air, putting a few feet of distance between them and him. He unwrapped the almost-empty bag from his wrist and the gulls moved back in as he tossed out a few more pieces of crust.
He often felt like this group of gulls was the same group that he’d fed every time he’d ever come, the same birds he’d fed when he was ten or twenty. He felt like they remembered him, knew him and waited here for him when he was gone. They were his friends, really, or so he felt. They made him happy, with their flapping and grabbing and screeching.
He tossed out the last of the bread and the gulls landed in perfect synchronicity, like one being. He stuffed the bag in the left pocket of his khakis so that it wouldn’t be a danger to the sea creatures, then pulled the gun from his waistband and slowly sat down on the sand.
A few minutes later, the explosion from the gun sent the gulls screeching into the air, then gradually, tentatively, they all came back to the sand. The ones with blood splattered on their gray and white bodies seemed especially agitated, even for seagulls.
* * *
Maggie Redmond pulled the coverlet over her head as her cell phone bleated from the nightstand.
“No,” she grumbled from under the covers, but the bleating continued and the coverlet did little to block the late morning sun.
She snaked a hand out from under the covers and pulled the cell phone in, thumbing the answer button.
“I just went to bed. If this isn’t life threatening, hang up.” “No,” she heard Wyatt Hamilton rumble back. Wyatt was the Sheriff of Franklin County and her boss. “I need you to come over to St. George Island. Got a guy that shot himself on the beach.”
“So? How badly is he hurt?”
“I don’t know how bad it hurt, but it sure as hell killed him,” Wyatt said.
“Ugh. Did you tell him it was my first day off in two weeks?” “I mentioned it,” he answered. “We’re at the first pull-off before you get to the state park.”
“Do I have time to take a shower?”
“Well, he’s awfully close to the shoreline and the seagulls keep making off with chunks of his childhood memories, but you’re the investigator, so it’s your call.”
“Alright. Stop it,” Maggie said, throwing her legs over the side of the bed. “Give me thirty minutes.”
“Okay,” Wyatt told her. “I know you’re gonna stop at Café Con Leche. Bring me one.”
“Do you have an ID?” Maggie asked as she stood up and pinched at her eyes.
“Yeah. Gregory Boudreaux,” Wyatt answered, then hung up.
It took Maggie a minute to put the phone down on the bed. It also took her a minute to remember to exhale. She walked into the bathroom and turned on the cold water tap. She splashed a couple of handfuls of water onto her face and stood and looked in the mirror.
Then she leaned over and threw up into the toilet.
* * *
Getting to St. George Island by car involved taking US 98, a five- mile or so causeway across East Bay to Eastpoint, then taking 300, another causeway that seemed to run four miles out into the Gulf of Mexico and stop, but which actually ended at St. George. There were days like today, when cloud cover was low, that Maggie got the impression she was driving out to some distant point on the horizon, leaving the mainland behind her for good. Off to her left was Dog Island, a state preserve with more egrets and gators than people. To her right was Cape St. George Island State Preserve, just a few yards of ocean from St. George itself.
Maggie rolled her window down and breathed deeply of the thick, salty air. She was driving straight into the morning sun and it scalded her eyes, already dry and tender from lack of sleep. She’d left her sunglasses at home, so she blinked several times to soothe her eyes and pulled the visor down.
Arriving on St. George, Maggie continued on 300, which turned into a main drag of sorts, running parallel to the beach and attended to on either side by streams of vacation rentals in various pastels. St. George Island was about 28-miles long and around half a mile wide in most places. The southern eight miles of the island made up the State Park.
After just a couple of miles, she passed through Vacationland and into the stretch of road leading to the 2,000-acre State Park. After half a mile, she came to the pull-off, a spot of asphalt with five or six parking spaces, all of them occupied.
Today, the spots weren’t filled with trucks belonging to men doing a little shore fishing. There was Wyatt’s cruiser, another car from the Sheriff’s department, the Medical Examiner’s van, and an apparently unnecessary EMT truck.
Finally, there was a blue Saab that Maggie knew belonged to Gregory Boudreaux, who was reportedly losing his mind on the beach.
Wyatt was leaning against his cruiser when Maggie pulled in. He headed over to Maggie’s ten-year old Cherokee as she parked and got out. He was easily six-foot four and, though he was closer to fifty than he was forty, walked toward Maggie’s Jeep with the lanky, relaxed gait of a man half his age.
Wyatt had come to Apalachicola from Cocoa Beach a little over six years ago, following his wife’s death from breast cancer. Between his widower status, the tinge of gray in his light brown hair and mustache, and his bright blue eyes, he’d quickly become the unconcerned darling of the women of Franklin County. His combination of goofy, self-deprecating humor and movie star looks made him equally popular with men and women.
Maggie knew that, his laid-back approach notwithstanding, Wyatt was smart as a whip and actually took his job pretty seriously, despite the fact that Apalachicola’s crime rate made Cocoa Beach look like Detroit.
She grabbed Wyatt’s coffee and handed it to him as the wind whipped her long, dark brown hair around her head.
“So, what’s the story?” she asked as she yanked her hair into a ponytail.
Wyatt took an appreciative swallow of his coffee before answering.
“Vacationite by the name of Richard Drummond found the body at 8:15 while he was walking his dog. A Golden Retriever mix of some kind. Might be a little Lab in there.”
Maggie grabbed her coffee out of the console, handed it to Wyatt and slammed her door before heading to the back of the Jeep. “When did Larry get here?” she asked, referring to the medical examiner.
She opened the gate and pulled out her crime scene kit.
“About ten minutes ago,” Wyatt answered. “He’s talking to the deceased now.”
“Who got here first?” she asked him, squinting over at the other cruiser.
“Dwight got the call from dispatch, got here at 8:25,” Wyatt said. “He called me on the way and I got here a little after 8:30.” He took another swallow of his coffee and held hers out to her. “No one else has happened on the scene and Dwight’s got it taped off. I took lots of pretty pictures for you.”
Maggie reclaimed her coffee and took a long swallow before they started walking the twenty or so yards along the path through the sea oats. Wyatt was more than a foot taller than Maggie and she took two steps to his one.
“Are we sure it’s suicide?”
“’course not,” Wyatt answered. “That’s why you’re here.” “Couldn’t you get Terry to handle it?”
“He’s over in Eastpoint working that robbery,” Wyatt said. “That’s what happens when you’re fifty percent of the Criminal Investigation Division, Maggie. You want guaranteed days off, move to Tallahassee.”
They reached the beach and Maggie saw the scene about ten feet further east. Larry Wainwright, a hundred years old if he was a day, was perched gingerly in the sand and leaning over the body. Sgt. Dwight Shultz, also known as Dudley Do-right, was keeping the seagulls out of the way by tossing them potato chips a few yards down the beach. The two EMTs stood nearby, with nothing really to do but wait to be dismissed.
Maggie and Wyatt stepped over the yellow crime scene tape and stopped near Gregory Boudreaux’s splayed and loafered feet. “Morning, Maggie,” Larry said over his shoulder.
“Morning, Larry,” she answered. “So what do we know so far?” “Well, rigor’s set in the face. It is now 9:20,” Larry answered, checking his watch. “Between that and body temperature, I’d say time of death was between 6:00a.m.and 6:30.”
Maggie finished pulling on her Latex gloves and crouched on the other side of the body with a few baggies in her hand.
A .38 revolver lay next to Gregory Boudreaux’s right hand, his thumb still stuck in the trigger guard. She glanced over at Larry.
“Wounds seem consistent with a .38?”
“They do,” Larry answered, and gently placed a gloved finger on the chin to turn the face toward him. “As you can see, we have quite the exit wound, which we’d expect from something of that caliber.”
“So it appears to be self-inflicted then?”
“I’d say so at this point. I don’t see anything at this juncture to argue against it,” Larry told her. “As you can see, there’s quite a bit of blowback on both hands, as well as residue.”
“Kind of unusual, it being so close to the body,” Wyatt mentioned noncommittally.
“True, true,” said Larry. “The kickback will usually send it flying. But I’d say it stays nearby or even in the decedent’s hands about twenty percent of the time.”
“You know Gregory Boudreaux, Maggie?” Wyatt asked her. “Some,” she said.
“Can you think of any reason he might want to blow his brains out?”
“I can’t really think of any reason why he shouldn’t,” she said evenly, focusing on Gregory’s lifeless right hand. There was a good bit of blood splatter.
“Well, then,” Wyatt said. “Can you sugarcoat that more specifically?”
Maggie took a slow breath and removed Boudreaux’s thumb from the trigger guard and placed the revolver in an evidence bag. She breathed out only after she’d sealed the bag.
“Not really,” she answered finally. “He was just your average Boudreaux, entitled and self-absorbed.”
The medical examiner struggled to rise and Wyatt hurried over to give him a hand.
“I’ve got what I need in the immediate,” Larry told them. “I’ll take one of those responder boys back to the van to get the body bag. Once we get him up, you’ll find most of the rest of the skull fragments are underneath his shoulders. Indicates to me he was seated when the gun was fired. I’ll know more in a couple of days.”
Larry called for one of the EMTs to come get a body bag, and Maggie watched the old man make his way back toward the parking area before she squinted up at Wyatt.
“Where’s the guy that found him?”
“I told him he could go on back to his rental,” Wyatt answered.
“I took his initial statement. He and the dog left the rental for their walk about 8:00, according to the Today show. He didn’t hear anything unusual prior to that, no gunshot or anything. You want to talk to him when you’re done?”
“How long is he here for?”
“He checks out of the rental on Monday.”
“I’ll wait. So far, it looks like a straight suicide. I don’t see any reason – was there a note?”
“Not so far. Checked his car, but I didn’t check his pockets.”
Maggie looked down at the body and sighed.
“Getting squeamish in your old age?” Wyatt asked her with a quick smile. She’d only just turned thirty-seven.
Maggie shot him a look, then reached into the right front pocket of Boudreaux’s khakis. A set of keys to the Saab and a stick of Dentyne. She bagged them and reached over the body to the other pocket, pulled out the empty bread bag.
Maggie and Wyatt exchanged a look and Maggie looked back toward the path to the parking lot.
“Well, I don’t think he left a trail back to his car,” Maggie said. “Dwight said it looked like he’d been feeding the gulls. When he first got here, there were a couple of birds with some splatter on them.”
Maggie looked over at Dwight, who had run out of potato chips and was shaking the bag at the remaining few birds, yelling, “Git!”
“Dwight, you think he was feeding the birds?” she called, holding up the bread bag.
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” he said, flapping his arms. “He liked to come out here a lot.”
Maggie frowned at Dwight’s back.
“How well did you know him?” she asked. Dwight looked over his shoulder at her.
“I didn’t, really,” he said. “But back when my brother Rob was still drinking, they used to hang out from time to time. They came out here to fish quite a bit and he told me once that Boudreaux almost always brought something for the seagulls. It bugged Rob, ’cause they’d hang around and try to get at the bait.”
“Okay,” Maggie said and bagged the bag. Then she looked at the body for a minute before looking just past the head, where a few bits and pieces of skull and hair had been glued to the sand by tacky blood. She looked back at the dead, meticulously manicured hands, and stretched her neck to conceal the shiver that went up her spine.
“Would you mind bagging the hands for me while I get what’s on the sand there?” she asked Wyatt.
“Sure.”
Wyatt squatted on the other side of the body and set his coffee down behind him while Maggie took some baggies and tape out of her kit. She handed them to him.
“Thanks,” she said, not looking up at his face.
She pulled a folding shovel out of her kit, opened it up, grabbed a few more bags and gently scooped up the remains and some sand, placed them in bags without talking further. As she slid the last scoop of sand and brain matter into a bag, a deformed .38 round revealed itself in the depression she’d left.
“Got a bullet,” she told Wyatt and picked it up and dropped it into its own bag.
“Did you get to see your kids this morning?” Wyatt asked her. “Only long enough to walk them to the school bus,” she said. “Sorry about your day off,” Wyatt told her. “I know you needed it.”
“It’s okay,” she answered. “I don’t think this is going to amount to anything, do you?”
“Doesn’t appear that way,” he answered.
“Well, then I might still get tomorrow off,” she said quietly. “I’ve got a bunch of squash and peppers to pick for tomorrow.”
Two days a week, local gardeners brought produce to Battery Park next to the marina, to be distributed among oyster-fishing families still trying to recover from the latest oil spill. The oysters still hadn’t come back to their former numbers and maybe they never would. They’d already been in decline, thanks to the two previous spills and Atlanta’s insistence on stealing water from the Apalachicola River to fill its swimming pools.
“I’m assuming Bennett Boudreaux is the next of kin?” Wyatt asked as he handed Maggie her roll of tape.
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